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My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

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Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#331

Post by iLoveOncall »

stevemadere wrote: post #329

I guess this signals the end of focusing on testing to prove one's "rank" as a student and actually start focusing on educating students rather than evaluating them. The whole problem with factory mass-education is the almost exclusive focus on evaluation. A little bit of education happens as a side-effect of the unrelenting soul-crushing evaluation so we've put up with it and called it education for 100 years. ChatG…

In France the extreme majority of your grades comes from in-class exams that are essay-based or at least long format rather than multi-choice like in the US. Homeworks are just exercises to learn and aren't graded.

This entirely solves ALL the problems introduced by LLMs.

The US just needs to adapt their evaluation system.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#332

Post by s1artibartfast »

nyrikki wrote: post #330
s1artibartfast wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is one of, if not the most, socially mobile countries in the west. Countries like the Nordics have much more equality of outcome, but the chances someone leaves the economic quintile they are born into is lower.

That is the popular myth. https://www.lisc.org/our-resources/resource/opportunity-atla... https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022_FM...

Paging through the Brookings document, it tracks pretty closely with what I have seen before. I dont see anything that contradicts what I have said (mobility is higher in the US than elsewhere).

1) Do you have a comparison with European countries that makes you think the US is worse?

2) What do you think US mobility numbers should look like? Pure randomness is not desirable either.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#333

Post by wnissen »

el_benhameen wrote: post #260
abeppu wrote: post #159

I'm close to someone who teaches at a university, and they're making heavy use of in-room essays written in blue books. This ensures that the work is purely the students, but I think it also has the side-effect that the grader is also working manually. I kinda think maybe at earlier levels, most homework should be moved into the classroom and done on paper anyway? What's the point of homework if they're not going to…

That’s unfortunate. I got a BA, and while I often question its value, one thing I do think college taught me was how to distill complex ideas, integrate them, and then form my own complex ideas from what I’d learned. I’d only really fully grok the concepts I was writing about (and the ideas I was trying to convey) after hours of trying to splice things together, staring at my screen, and rewriting and reformulating.…

Yep. What I tell my kid is, "The purpose of homework isn't to get correct answers, any more than the purpose of weightlifting is higher weights."

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#334

Post by hb53821 »

rhelz wrote: post #324
dcchambers wrote: post #219

I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least onc…

// a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents // Is this really something to which we need to attribute blame? I mean, after I learned how to program, I never again sat down and did 100 computations by hand. But I never felt a need to feel culpable or blame my parents. LLMs happened. They are not going away. There is not an employer on the planet who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the wo…

By your own wording, before you learned programming, you learned to compute by hand. Then programming served as a way of automating what you already knew, but you learned it first, and that's the key issue. Don't skip the foundational learning step.

LLMs are just today's flavor of automation. We've automated tasks in the past, and we will automate tasks in the future. Automation happened and will continue to happen regardless of shape and form.

I agree with the high-level sentiment, "We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we live in." Still, we must also be careful not to skip foundational subjects simply because they're suddenly easy to automate.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#335

Post by hb53821 »

bilsbie wrote: post #223

I have this problem too! I wrote up this system prompt I want to set on my daughters account. You’re welcome to try using it and let me know it goes. (When I made a new chatgpt account for her it wouldn’t load. I need to try to set it up again) Prompt: This is my 9th graders account. She has been trying to avoid learning or even thinking by copy and pasting homework and quiz questions into chatgpt and not even readin…

Super interesting idea.

I don't have a ChatGPT account otherwise I'd try this myself but can someone try this question from the article, "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours?" with and without the prompt?

I'm very curious if it has any effect on the result.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#336

Post by cloverich »

thijson wrote: post #150
Freak_NL wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> […] coma inducing toddler videos […] Otherwise known as CocoMelon.

My five year old son was watching Lankybox, that stuff is mindnumbing. I tried to control what he's able to watch, but next thing I know he's watching it again. I ended up removing Youtube, relying on PBS Kids. He protested though, PBS Kids is long format shows, and that's not stimulating enough for him.

We slowly resorted to letting them watch almost whatever they want, but an extremely reduced volume. On most days there is no TV at all; on days where there is its usually one small block (30-90 minutes). We disallow ipad (etc) at the dinner table, while eating out, in the car, etc, outright. It definitely took some time, but by being extremely consistent eventually it panned out. I think yes not only more difficult for some kids than others, but also depends on your kid. Young rambunctious boys are an entirely different thing than relatively chill daughters, so I try not to judge.

Other kids around + outdoor play time is the only thing I see that consistently works well all around for everyone.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#337

Post by aio2 »

corysama wrote: post #185

Some 15 years ago I recall some schools in California bragging about their success in flipping the school schedule around. They had students watch lectures at home as videos. Then during class they did "homework". Seems like this method is going to become a necessity if students can just prompt "Hey GPT. Do my homework for me. Thanks." at home every day.

It won't work. I've done it.

What happens is it's usually done by a lazy teacher who has no idea what they're even teaching. Most kids won't be motivated to learn and watch from the videos.

I consider myself studious. When I was in that class, I watched all the video lessons and whatnot at home. Even then, I had a poor understanding of the material, and obviously the teacher was of no help.

Although not much better, a lecture is better of the two. Hands on learning in the best, but not necessarily possible with certain subjects.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#338

Post by throwaway314155 »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #318
rcxdude wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how else did you intend percentile to be inferred in your comment?

Based on their actual merit? For example, if someone on HN says ‘a 50th percentile intern’ at a certain company, they probably wouldn’t be suggesting the intern literally has a gpa in the 50th percentile among all the other interns at that company.

You're talking about the way the world should be. Reality is different.

For instance, having graduated from Harvard is going to get you a fairly good job _regardless_ of their GPA.

Similarly, there is no objective way to measure "merit" that isn't unfair to _someone_ and also scales to dozens/hundreds/thousands of students. So people use GPA.

Life isn't fair.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#339

Post by AlotOfReading »

rhelz wrote: post #324
dcchambers wrote: post #219

I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least onc…

// a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents // Is this really something to which we need to attribute blame? I mean, after I learned how to program, I never again sat down and did 100 computations by hand. But I never felt a need to feel culpable or blame my parents. LLMs happened. They are not going away. There is not an employer on the planet who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the wo…

Bread machines exist. They produce acceptable bread. Do you train a good baker by giving them a bread machine? Can you even be a good baker if the only bread you've ever eaten is white loaves from a bread machine?

LLM are a tool that has to be guided by human experience. It's really hard to do that if you don't have experience outside LLMs.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#340

Post by wendyshu »

dcchambers wrote: post #219

I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least onc…

You mean uninterested?
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